BIO

Priya Natarajan is an Associate Professor of Astronomy and of Physics at Yale University, and has been a faculty member at Yale since 2000.  She received bachelor’s degrees in both physics and mathematics from MIT (1991), and, supported by an Ida Green Fellowship (1991-93), began her doctoral studies there, but on winning an Isaac Newton Studentship she continued her doctoral work at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, receiving her Ph.D. in 1998. During her time there, in 1993, she was elected a member of the Cambridge Philosophical Society and a Fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Society. Her doctoral work was punctuated by her studies at two other institutions: she spent a year as a CITA Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics before returning to England to take up a Title A Research Fellowship for study at Trinity College, Cambridge.  

 

Ms. Natarajan’s accomplishments include the discovery, with Ezequiel Treister, of the existence of an upper mass limit for black holes in the Universe; her efforts to map in detail the spatial distribution of dark matter in cosmic structures; and her investigation of gravitational lensing by clusters of galaxies in order to better understand dark matter and dark energy. During her Guggenheim Fellowship term, she will be studying black hole formation at high redshift.

 

Among her honors are a Resident Faculty Fellowship at Yale’s Saybrook College (2003), a National Academy of Sciences’ Kavli Frontiers Fellowship (2006), election to a Whitney Humanities Fellowship at Yale (2006), and a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2008-09).  In addition, she was recently admitted to the Royal Astronomical Society.

 

Ms. Natarajan is not only a gifted teacher and researcher.  She is also a published poet and, since 2005, she writes a regular column for Asian Age, and has contributed articles to Discover making topics in astronomy accessible to the general public.  She currently is a member of the Science Advisory Board for the public television series NOVA.

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